


strange weather

by machibouke



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Friendship/Love, Gen, Implication of Bullying/Suicide, M/M, POV First Person, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 16:49:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7276084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machibouke/pseuds/machibouke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That's the thing about love, unfortunately: you don't get much say in who you develop feelings for.</p><p>In the year 1999 during his final year of high school, Ohno Satoshi falls in - and out - of love. Twice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	strange weather

**Author's Note:**

> title borrowed from a song of the same name "strange weather" by anna calvi and david byrne.

 

> _In 1999, I fell in love with the wrong girl._
> 
> _I was a few months away from turning nineteen, still fairly young but none the wiser, like most people my age. I knew enough to know that, by all accounts, she was not the one for me, and I for her. That’s the thing about love, unfortunately: you don’t get much say in who you develop feelings for. Or worse, in my case, who you fall for at first sight. It’s a matter of the heart and, ultimately, what the heart wants, the heart gets. Right?_
> 
> _That’s not what happened here._

 

 

It takes a while for me to recall every detail she burned into my memory. It’s a bit of an after burn nowadays. Her name was Mimiya Saeko. She was typically beautiful. Black hair swept back by a black band, sandy white skin untouched by summer (the polar opposite to mine, that craved and indulged in the sun when it could), and a smile that could melt anything in its path. She was just another pretty epitome of winter that all the boys fell for; a living, Japanese embodiment of _Snow White_. If anyone else looked at her for as long as I did, they would know it wasn’t just her smile that got to everyone. Her eyes had a certain warmth in them that was a constant reminder that she was in high competition with the sun. 

Because of where my seat was in class, I was only able to see her profile and her hand busily copying down the notes on the board. But even that contented me. I was happy with such a mundane thing, but sometimes I almost hated myself for acknowledging the fact that I was in love with her. It was pathetic, it was stupid, and my one small fear was that I was becoming one of those people that was going to spend the rest of their time in high school suffering in a one-sided crush. How typical. My life was being reduced to the level of a summer drama on TV.

I rarely saw Saeko except for my biweekly biology classes, a subject that was compulsory by all means but I still did a little better than average in my grades. Saeko had an aptitude for the human body too (a lot of the guys in my year made several dirty jokes about it), and so did I up until I set eyes on her at the very beginning of the year. I ended up getting next to no work done in order to inconspicuously stare at her from afar. She was, as most girls are, oblivious to her own effect and the sometimes shy eyes that were always held on her every movement.

And to think I never even got the chance to talk to her. Four weeks into the first term, she left the school for a more specified education course somewhere in Osaka, and consequently left me reeling from my own idiocy. I didn’t know what else to do once I had nothing to look at during class. A stupid, overdramatic thought hit me. Maybe I had been too summery for the wintery girl to take notice of; I stuck out like a sore thumb with my brown suntanned skin. I tried not to think about that.

Nothing remotely romantic had happened between Saeko and I; we weren’t even platonic, merely a girl and boy who attended the same school for some time. But for some reason, for weeks on end, I found myself feeling like one crucial aspect of my life had been rudely severed from me. The routine was broken. I no longer knew what to do with myself, and neither did my body. Having taken up nearly all of my time just to get any glimpse of her that I could, I found unwanted time on my unnerved hands. It was like someone had died and I was coming apart achingly slowly. My fingers no longer wanted to work or draw or do anything they usually would have done. I would spend most of my free time (and other hours where I should have been working my part-time job but wasn’t bothered doing) standing in the stairwell of my apartment building. Eventually this became too claustrophobic for my head, so I exchanged the graffiti-abused wall for the open view from the rooftop, the whirring of the air vents and the travelling smell of burning tobacco my only company.

I made a rare friend during this period of desolation, under half a year after Saeko left, and it was pretty much by accident. I was merely searching for something, anything to do with myself - a substitute for Saeko to fill my time with again. I was suddenly acutely aware of just how much I had been drifting through school and life. There was an unbelievable amount of time on my hands. I rarely bothered to study, so my grades were unchanged and still weren’t spectacular. School was not the issue. Everywhere I went, I was just scraping by with no particular course of progress in mind, and that in itself was alarming. Graduation was due to take place in a few months’ time, and I wasn’t even half ready to project myself into the world of adults.

On a sleepless and cold October morning at two a.m., I was obsessed with the idea of taking up smoking, standing up on my rooftop and drowning myself in the smell of cigarette smoke rising up from a group of drunken salary men on the corner of my street who had yet to return to their own homes. I’d stolen an unopened pack of cigarettes the earlier in the morning from my father’s room just to test my sense of self-control, and maybe play around a bit with my reflexes, too. To see if this was going to be one of those unhealthy coping mechanisms I would come to adopt when the times got stressful. I’d actually torn the plastic packaging off and plucked one out before I heard the shuffle of feet behind me and watched the hand of someone snatch it from between my fingers. This was followed by a long tutting sound.

“Have you been living under a rock or what?” A boy asked me, voice covered with thick disdain. “Hasn’t anybody ever told you smoking can kill you?”

But he popped the smoke into his mouth right before me, taking my lighter as well to set it alight. He took a puff and coughed with a pleased grimace.

“And it’s not bad for you?” I asked evenly. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of him yet. I eyed my stolen cigarette.

“Ah, it doesn’t matter, because I’m already too far gone anyway,” he’d told me, not making much sense. He only looked about twelve in terms of build. Once he had taken a proper breath again, he smiled and handed the lighter back to me. “Ninomiya Kazunari. But you can call me Nino, because that's what everyone else seems to like doing these days. Who are you?”

Who _was_ I? All I could tell him was my name, but I got the feeling he wanted a lot more than that despite him saying nothing more. 

Ninomiya turned out to be an unexpectedly welcome distraction during my sudden withdrawal from life, even if he did tell me to my face that I looked like - and I quote - a “miserable piece of shit”. He was only telling me a truth I wasn’t getting around to accepting just yet. Another bit of conversation revealed that we lived in the same apartment block, and also happened to both go to the same high school and had somehow miraculously managed not to bump into each other on the way there every morning.

“Ah, I just started last month just after my family moved here. I’m a first-year, class 1-A,” he explained to me with half-lidded eyes. 

School was well into its second term by then, so, again, his words didn’t add up. But I didn’t question it. He slowly began to trickle into my life, popping in and out of it when he felt it necessary.

Ninomiya was not much of a friend at first - nor was he an acquaintance either, really - but he at least talked and occasionally gave me the entirety of his lovingly packed lunches. He seemed to have experienced life differently to me, and that’s what sparked an interest in me. Despite being only sixteen, his overall personality was paradoxically different to anyone else his age - and anyone my age, for that matter. He was more a bold risk-taker, jumping at the chance for anything that he wanted because he had a self-confessed fear of “missing out”, whereas I was more of a cautious and heavily-guarded person. I could never wrap my head around his unpredictable impulses. Essentially, we were polar opposites: the introvert and the extrovert, the first-year and the third-year, at completely different ends of the high school chain. We were never even meant to be near each other, let alone be friends. But it somehow all came together and we made an inconsistent friendship work. 

Ninomiya left us mostly to chance, though. Something that I stupidly accepted.

“I saved you from totally destroying your lungs, so you owe me one,” he’d told me matter-of-factly when I didn’t initially warm up to the idea of us being so close (and being friends).

He then reached into my pocket and snatched the whole carton from me with a thin smile. He held the pack up to my eye level.

“To some people, old man, these things are lifesavers. Not for you, though. I’ll be taking these. You can keep the lighter.”

 

 

Winter came modestly that year in November, with only a small chill blanketing our small city at the start of December. Snow started to fall in powdery clumps a few days into the month, no heavy stuff, which made getting to school for final exams tolerable and set the scene for the upcoming holiday break with Christmas in store.

I’d just turned nineteen, the oldest in my year because I was born later in the year. Because of this (mostly), I wasn’t the most popular in my school - by a long shot - but Nino invited me to a Christmas-slash-New Year’s-Eve themed party held in his apartment on the last day of the year. His mother and sister had gone north for the break to visit relatives, leaving a reluctant Nino behind, and I was hesitant to come at first. Parties were not my place. Apparently, Nino wasn’t worried about status or reputation. I knew if I turned down his offer, he would be grumpy despite being well aware I wasn’t exactly the life of the party and would probably dampen whatever drunken fun he’d pinned his hopes on having for the night.

That being said, he would have probably come down to my door and dragged me out himself anyway. So I went along, aiming for a more spontaneous nature.

Nino had only just reached the tender age of sixteen of a high-schooler but had somehow gotten his hands on large amounts of alcohol, undoubtedly through connections, and as a result I was long gone from sobriety later into the night. I no longer recognized most of my surroundings, let alone the people in them; I worried distantly that my mother could catch me like this. It was typical of me to slip a few drinks now and then after school. But somewhere in me, I didn’t want Nino to see that weird, drunken side of me. I took refuge in the kitchen.

The events that took place after that are outlined but hazy, like the untouched pages of a children’s colouring-in book. Ironically, everything around me was bursting with so many colours I had this crazy urge to touch every object I seen. Then I cried a bit. Soon, I was doused with the feeling of what some people might call “liquid courage”. My father once told me that everyone in the world all have something that they secretly yearn for, something that they desperately want to do; something that might be considered wrong or impossible. But it’s always there picking away at your resolve, waiting for the right amount of carelessness and courage to combine and surface.

Until that night, I wasn’t aware I had something I wanted (or needed) to do that badly. I didn’t know what my yearning was until I caught sight of Nino in my daze: the only person I could ascertain in the hordes of people. I immediately realized I was harbouring one of those “wrong” and “impossible” things - I quickly viewed it as a problem. A rash problem that had held no real meaning and one that I was giving way too much thought to. Honestly, it had been playing up at the back of my mind from the moment Nino stopped me on the rooftop, but two months ago, it had been innocent and insignificant. A mere curiosity, wondering what Nino was doing projecting himself onto me. But now, it was dangerous, and alcohol wasn’t exactly going to make it go away. It was one of those things I ignored when it first popped into my mind earlier on in the night, because it was unfamiliar territory and something I knew I shouldn’t enter. That just made it harder for me to say no in the end. When you tell yourself you can’t have something, you only want it more, don’t you?

In the last two months, every time I had seen Nino, things came into focus a little more and became a little more okay. The curiosity had spawned into a mutual affection that was strange but somehow worked, and I dealt with that. I would notice certain things about him the more we walked and talked; I became more aware of his physical bearings - the warm but closed-off brown hue of his eyes that didn’t match his hard-headed perspective but went well with his laugh, or the freckle on his chin that looked so out of place on his oval-shaped, insanely youthful face, but at the same time it was so decidedly _Nino_. I started to like how I could differentiate his emotions as they came - like when he was feeling creative, he would say things that sounded irrelevant but had this way of making them sound absolutely relevant; or if he was feeling blue, just registering the sight of him with a guitar and you would just know not to approach him; and when he thought I wasn’t paying enough attention to his words, he would end perfectly sensible sentences with something bizarre, like, “I saw you the other day, and I waved to you, but you pretended not to see me—I was thinking to myself, _wow, I’d love to have sex with Oh-chan right now. Sex, sex, sex_ ,” and that would usually pull me out of whatever stupor I was sitting in at that moment, as well as adding unjustified fuel to the _innocent_ fire on the backburner in my mind. 

But when he was nervous, which was hardly ever, he would start making unwarranted, very hurtful and sarcastic comments about nothing specific - I was an occasional target of this, but any topic that could distract him and wouldn’t induce more nerves would do just fine. 

Nino was doing exactly that the night of the party. I’d come out of the kitchen to see him just as gone as I was, making an idiot of himself by trying to pick up one of older girls who was expressing zero interest in him. She barked at him that she had showed up only because she caught word of a party happening in the block and had no idea it was some would-be first-year who was throwing it, but none of it was getting through to Nino. He was smiling stupidly, telling her she looked even hotter when she was angry - like _Godzilla_ with boobs and great legs. She hit him hard across the face.

With a heavy heart, I watched this. I saw it as an opportunity to solve two issues at once: to reprieve Nino of the humiliation that was more than likely going to hound him when school started again in April, and to rid myself of The Problem that was steadily taking leave from the back of my mind and was sneaking its way past my heart.

It started with lugging a stubborn Nino outside to his little balcony, away from prying eyes and more possible pitfalls. We sat in silence for about twenty minutes, Nino huffing to himself and wiping away momentary tears that snuck up on him. It was sometime past midnight and by that time most of the stragglers had left and only a dwindling few were still lounging around in the living room, seeking out any leftover drinks. 

I leaned over the railing and sighed. The alcohol was still very much buzzing through my veins, a heavy and light weight at the same time, clouding any ability I used to have that helped me think.

“Since you ruined my chances of getting a date and a girlfriend,” Nino muttered to me out of the blue, not sounding too pissed off about it, “I challenge you to a snowball fight.”

He jerked his chin down to the ground below in challenge. Because it was a few days past Christmas, a considerable amount of snow had now fallen - and was still falling in thick swarms. It was white everywhere, clean and cold: a perfect snapshot of a winter in Tokyo. One that I would have preferred to enjoy from afar than up close, honestly.

But I didn’t have the heart to remind Nino about the rejection from the third-year girl (that was going to be my petty excuse to distract him from the idea of throwing snowballs around). By “fight”, he seemed on the offensive - something I still wasn’t used to with him, and I didn’t want to get on his bad side while drunk. So I meekly compromised by suggesting we build some snowmen, maybe up on the roof. He complied with a “yeah, all _right_ ”, obviously uninterested in such a childish activity. Like throwing a few snowballs around was above making snowmen.

We dragged out feet up the fire escape with Nino at my heel still grumbling under his breath about being betrayed. 

After compiling one-third of his poorly-constructed snowman, Nino said something I didn’t catch and collapsed to the floor in a dusty white cloud. He began to make a snow angel with his arms and legs, murmuring something about heaven.

I abandoned my own snow friend and fell down right next to him, starting an angel of my own. We were too close, so our arms kept knocking each other and my fingers kept hitting his head, making us giggle and forget a lot of things.

“Ugh, it’s freezing!” Nino hissed through chattering teeth after a bit of trash talk, pausing to rub his arms and then cup his hands around his mouth to blow hot air into. He looked down at himself and made a face, like the mistake he had just made was something that happened too much, and started laughing. “Of course. I forgot my fucking coat. Now what.”

I looked at him briefly, hopefully, and heard the chance in his words. I could move closer and wrap my arms around his whole body. If he asked me what I was doing, which wasn’t unlikely, I would simply retort that I found shared human warmth severely underrated during winter and that we needed to do something about it. It seemed logical to me at the time, but what did I know? I was beyond the basic ability of connecting one muddled thought to another at that point.

Instead, Nino remarked, “You look like shit again. Know what people who look like shit need? A hug.” And then he rolled over to crash into my side with a manic laugh. He withdrew himself too quickly for me to respond, and I was convinced I’d lost my chance. I also found myself questioning if Nino could read my mind.

Then he stilled for a moment and sighed contentedly. “I could lie here _all_ night long,” he said with an edge of determination to his voice. I glanced at the goose bumps flaring on his wrists and stifled a laugh at his self-contradiction. 

“Without a coat and completely drunk?” I felt the need to remind him.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, do you still have those cigarettes you took from me?”

Nino turned his head sideways to laugh right in my face. “You kidding me? That was three months ago.”

“No...I think it was two months ago.”

“Two?” 

“Maybe it _was_ three,” I agreed wonderingly, to which Nino muttered, “Nah, it was two. I remember, because as soon as I left you, I smoked them all back down in my bedroom while staring at my calendar.”

“Seriously?!”

“Ha! No!” he exclaimed with a more uncontrolled kind of laughter. “My mom saw them in my hand when I came in through the door. When I told her that someone has to make the clouds and it might as well be me, she threw them out the window and smacked me on the back of the head.” His laugh petered out to a breathy giggle. “My happiness literally went out the window. Haha.”

I laughed along with him, unsure whether to believe anything else that came from his mouth.

“You’re so gullible, Oh-chan. It’s a much underrated personality trait of yours.”

“Thanks,” I murmured bemusedly, feeling like a question mark belonged on the end of my gratitude.

My head lolled to the side this time. Because of the hug he had ambushed me with before, Nino had rolled back to the side only slightly, leaving not much distance between us. Whether or not it was on purpose, I was not sure. I silently watched him catch flyaway bits of snow on the tip of his tongue and for some reason that made me feel sorry for him.

“Have you ever told someone you loved them?”

Nino’s lips stretched into an easy smile. “Oh, loads of times.”

I racked my brains for another question, one that wouldn't coax an answer out of Nino so effortlessly. “Has anyone ever told you they loved you?”

My tone must have been low, or maybe I’d just gone too far with the second question, because Nino met my eyes sceptically with something unreadable flickering in his own. His eyebrows pulled down and his lips disappeared into a thin, puzzled line. “What?” he hissed, like he hadn’t heard me properly, but I know he had; he managed to recover from this quickly and dragged his eyes back to the sky above.

His eyes blinked furiously as he crossed his arms. He seemed bothered. Like most teenage boys, maybe love was a sensitive topic for him. But unlike other boys, he had an incredibly quick-fire ability to pull a paper-thin curtain over his emotions.

“Not counting family? Yeah.”

“Who?”

I was unbearably curious to find out who else had fallen for him and subsequently succumbed. If Nino had even let them in. I was so sure I couldn’t have been the only one. As he searched his mind for the answer, I watched the little pieces of snow land on his right cheek this time, and another two on the tip of his nose. One last flake swiftly melted upon coming into contact with his lips, and he licked the drop away.

“I can’t tell you who,” he told me somewhat petulantly and scratched his nose where two more flakes of snow sat. “Then you would know too many of my secrets. And I’ve told you so many of them already. You can’t know everything about me, Oh-chan. Where’s the fun in that?”

Right then, I was willing to tell him everything about myself just to outweigh that fact. But I refrained and instead shifted closer without his noticing. I had a sinking feeling that he’d told me a lie about being loved. Why did it feel like that person didn’t exist? Why was Nino being evasive about the subject?

“I’ve had people tell me they hate me. They hated me so much that they wanted me to jump off a building to kill myself.”

 _That_ was why. I didn’t expect him to tell me something so graphic, and the natural want to comfort him came to me, but he fixed me with that hard look he often wore that roughly meant _get the fuck out of my face right now._

“But I didn’t jump, did I? Because fuck them. It’s my life, not theirs.”

I nodded weakly.

“You were probably wondering why I joined school so late, huh? I kind of—Oi! Don’t give me that look. I saw your face when I told you, old man.” He sighed softly, hands finding his collarbones and rubbing small circles into them. The action fascinated me, and then he transferred the hand to my chest and repeated the movements. “At my old school, there was a group of guys in my year that picked on me. It wasn’t all that bad, really. I defended myself fine up until they almost pushed me off the end of our main building.”

I did a visible double-take, making sure I heard right. There was no way…not Nino…

“Hmm…” Nino sighed again, shifting his body slightly. He took his time to start talking again, measuring my wordless response. “Some people are just really twisted in the head. But these idiots were plain vile. One afternoon before the last period of the day, they turned on me and said they couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. I told them to find another way to walk to class. So they dragged me into the bathroom just as the classes began and made me stand on one of the toilets in the stall. First they pissed on me. Then one of them put some rope in my hand and told me to hang myself from the pipes above.” He laughed humourlessly, clearly stuck in his tangled memories. “I said no. They were all standing at the cubicle door, so there was no way I could run off. Eventually they realized they couldn’t force me to do it without it looking deliberate, so they herded me back up to the roof for the second time to try and shove me off.”

I patiently listened, on edge with how the story was going to end, but to Nino’s unending credit, not once did his voice break.

“Some teacher happened to be smoking up there when we broke through the door. He realized what the group were up to and what they were going to do with me—they were pretty famous around the school for turning other people's lives into a living hell—so he grabbed me but the rest of them ran off before he could get a hold of them. They were found later on and suspended on the spot for the rest of the term. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would see them again after the break, so...I left.”

After he finished, I was frozen, and not because of the cold. The cold was irrelevant and petty now. It could not - and would not - compute in my head. It wouldn’t register Nino’s story. I couldn’t understand that some people could hate someone like Nino to such a hateful extent. To drive him to the top of a building, to virtually force him to kill himself and make it look like he had committed suicide. I honestly would never have known he’d been through that kind of thing. He’d managed to keep it so well under wraps up until then, managed to put on a brave face and keep up a casual, not necessarily _happy_ , but normal façade.

Images entered my mind mostly against my will, random and indistinctive: cigarettes, a toilet, rope, my hands, Nino, a grim smile, puffs of smoke in the air, _Nino..._

_To some people, old man, these things are lifesavers..._

“Sorry,” Nino mumbled self-disparagingly, somewhat disgruntled. He removed his hand from me. “I didn’t tell you earlier because I thought I’d scare you off with the sob story. I didn’t want to be pitied or seen as the victim of something. Because I’m _not_ , Oh-chan. I’m fine.”

I took a while to say, “I know,” and then, “no, it’s fine”, but it really wasn’t. After that I still couldn’t manage words. I couldn’t say I’m sorry, because I wasn’t the one who had done wrong by him. I still felt terrible and invalidly responsible. I really had nothing to do with Nino’s sadness, though, and hoped I would never ever have anything to do with it.

“We’re so much closer to the sky up here,” Nino said in a faraway voice, pointing upwards and nodding. He was obviously changing the topic. And also starting to look drowsy. “It was a good idea coming up here instead.”

I rolled over slightly to lean on my arm. I was feeling close to sleep myself, my eyes were heavy as lead; the effects of alcohol were gradually subsiding. I thought distantly that it wouldn’t be so bad to fall asleep up there. I moved my hand into the air experimentally, feeling its weight. I let it hover over Nino’s face, showering it in shadow, and he did nothing about it. His eyes stared up at it, transfixed and glassy. Then I lowered it, brushing an intrusive bit of fringe out of his eyes. He blinked but still didn’t reject any of the advances, merely turning his head to the side and watching me closely through his lashes. This wasn’t too unfamiliar to him; he touched me enough all the time to know how nice it felt.

The cold was now starting to seep into my shoulder and side, but I didn’t care. Nobody had ever looked at me the way Nino was looking at me just then. It was deliberate. It had to mean _something_. My fingers dared to move down further, over his forehead thoughtfully, storing the physical memory of the dry but soft skin. The index finger continued tracing down the sudden bridge of his nose. He licked his lips just before my finger ended on his bottom lip. I left it sitting there, feeling the texture. It didn’t move from there even when he asked me to move it.

“It’s stuck. I can’t,” I insisted with a nervous laugh, my eyes fixated on my frozen finger, the coldness starting to burn in a painfully ice-hot way. 

Nino smiled, whispering a small berating, “ _Oh_ -chan.” The skin of his lips stretched out beneath my touch and he playfully poked his tongue out again to melt the chill away. My finger still wouldn’t budge, but I wasn’t putting in any effort to move it. Eventually he pulled my wrist away with his own hand, but not before giving my finger one last flicker of his tongue. It was not accidental.

I don’t quite know how, but his fingers linked so naturally with mine. I lowered our hands to the snow-dusted space between us, still unbothered by the cold that met my skin immediately, but Nino winced and I flipped our hands over so that only mine was touching the floor. I wrapped it tighter around his and squeezed. 

I lied there for a while with him like that, a warm feeling spreading through my stomach that countered the cold whenever he stared at me, but Nino sat up slightly and looked down at me. He swooped down low until our faces were close, waiting a moment to breathe into the space, and then our lips touched. It confused me at first that I didn’t react negatively, and even further when I returned the kiss with as much ferocity as my heart desperately wanted to. Nino coaxed me into a sitting position and sat himself in my lap, letting go of my hand to hold the side of my face tighter and closer and we shared another long kiss. The world was shaking and it suddenly felt foreign; my vision blurred by a whirlwind of snow and a young face slowly leaving mine.

Hands were pushing me down. I felt my back hit the cold ground, and I was alone.

 

 

* * *

 

**epilogue**

I left Tokyo in late March after graduation and headed for Kyoto.

I did not ask Nino about what had happened straight away, mostly because it took me a while to even remember what happened. A few days after that night at his party, I went to visit him to talk about that kiss, and maybe we could straighten out the reasons behind why it had happened. I knew why _I_ had kissed him, but did Nino know too? 

But I jogged down the stairs to find his apartment bare, safe for a few strings of golden and green tinsel on the floor and markings of where the furniture pieces had been mounted. On the door, there was a simple, messily-written yellow note stuck there, reading _**EVICTION NOTICE TO TENANTS.**_

And that was that. He’d left, just like Saeko, except the difference was that, with Nino, something had actually taken place. We’d made a connection that I couldn’t acknowledge was gone just like that. 

I wasn’t sure at first why he had run away, but for a while I entertained the thought that maybe he really did have telepathic abilities. Maybe he saw right through me, saw how easily I fell, and was most likely scared at the thought that he was falling into something he hadn’t experienced before. It was plausible. Or maybe he had been playing around and underestimated how seriously I would take it and got scared. I never admitted it to myself, and I still won’t, but I recognized the handwriting on that eviction paper. There was the possible conclusion that it was Nino’s excuse - his guilt-free ticket to escaping without repercussions. I didn’t think he could be that heartless though.

I was fairly angry for a good few months, but then I made peace with it like you just do in life. There wasn’t much point in getting pissed off with someone I’d never see again. I missed him more than I cared to admit. Whenever I looked at snow on the floor when winters came, or at high-rise rooftops, or even my own fingers, I was reminded of Nino and the chain reaction of events that created that kiss. It was just one of those events I couldn’t stop reliving in my head no matter what I did. In pleasantly vivid flashes that made my heart swell, ache and then fall. I could revisit Nino whenever I wanted to, just by closing my eyes and letting them paint me back into that moment, where Ninomiya Kazunari was eternally sixteen, untouched and covered in snow. And I could see Nino’s wistful face as he told his story, that numbing chill in my right shoulder returning as I leaned on it to look at him.

On my second-last day of college in 2003, I took up smoking for good in a stupidly sore attempt to keep the memory of Nino fresh.

I like to think it worked.

 

 

 

 

> _In 1999, I fell in love with the wrong boy._
> 
> _I was a few months past the age of nineteen, still fairly young but none the wiser, like most people my age. I knew enough to know that, by all accounts, he was not the one for me, and I for him. That’s the thing about love, unfortunately: you don’t get much say in who you develop feelings for. Or worse, in my case, who you fall for at first sight. It’s a matter of the heart and, ultimately, what the heart wants, the heart gets. Right?_
> 
> _That’s not what happened here._
> 
>  

**Author's Note:**

> feedback would be greatly appreciated! I still think my way of writing kind of sucks (plus, I've never written anything from a first-person point of view before). :|


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